‘The Last Of Us’ Season 2 Episode Count Revealed As Craig Mazin & Neil Druckmann Explain Decision & Tease Additional Seasons

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: It’s a case of good news-bad news for The Last of Us fans who have been patiently waiting more than a year for new episodes of HBO‘s award-winning drama adaptation based on the acclaimed video game.

When Season 2 finally arrives in 2025, it will be shorter than Season 1, consisting of seven episodes. But the good news is that a potential third season will be “significantly larger” and possibly bigger in scope, and there could very well be a Season 4 coming behind it according to series co-creators, executive producers, showrunners and directors Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann.

Plus, one of the Season 2 episodes will be “quite big” in length. The size of the Season 2 order was hinted at in January when Deadline revealed the lineup of the season’s seven directors, including Mazin and Druckmann.

The duo arrived at the number of episodes after careful consideration. “The story material that we got from Part II of the game is way more than the story material that was in the first game, so part of what we had to do from the start was figure out how to tell that story across seasons,” Mazin said. “When you do that, you look for natural breakpoints, and as we laid it out, this season, the national breakpoint felt like it came after seven episodes.” That means that Mazin and Druckmann envision the series running for at least three seasons, and possibly four.